Chapter 89: May You Live in Interesting Times
Benton started reading the new quests from the top. The first one didn’t seem too hard on the face of it. Getting one hundred members only required forty-five more, and he fully intended to induct fifty in the coming days. The part about loyalty, though…
“System,” he said internally, “what is my current average loyalty?”
7.2
That wasn’t so bad, considering that most of his sect members hadn’t been with him all that long. Even some of the disciples he’d had the longest hadn’t been around him much. He had, after all, left for three months right after accepting the twelve in the village.
There was some reason for concern, though. That seven point two was taking into account the average feelings of fifty-five people, ones who had decent reasons to be loyal to him. The fifty villagers he was about to add were instead much more likely to have allegiance to the mayor rather than him.
An average higher than six wasn’t likely. To start off with, anyway.
Oh well, he had no doubt that, as long as he stayed true to his commitment to them, all would increase as time went on. Which was good because the reward for completing that quest was a perk point.
He wanted that perk point.
The next quest, Defend Your Territory, involved building a wall around the sect, a task he was already about to start work on. That one was basically five free Shop Points.
The combination of Pavilionize and House Your Members might have been long term projects were it not for the buildings he had stored in his rings. As it was, he’d convert those into ten Shop Points as soon as he got the wall built.
It was the last one that really was the eye opener. The area was no longer under a beast tide watch or warning. The beast tide was coming. Benton just didn’t know when it would arrive.
He couldn’t help but remember the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Well, times sure were getting interesting. Benton added preparing for that potential calamity to his mental To Do list as the most critical item.